TERAWORK

Lack of access to flexible source of competent manpower is a major reason 60% of businesses shutdown within their first 3 years, fund or no fund. Close to a million newly registered businesses across Africa countries are affected yearly, and this accounts for global loss of $443million annually. 

Yearly, 5million graduates are added to Africa existing unemployed; some because they live in remote areas or are women constrained to work from home. Systems that eliminate challenges like uneven availability of job opportunities, lack of trust while working remotely, skills gap etc. are lacking.

TERAWORK’s solution enables businesses conveniently hire on-demand vetted independent workforce within 24-hrs. Our end-to-end online freelance marketplace facilitates businesses and freelance workers trust working remotely with each other. With 6,000+ active users, 4,000+ jobs done already, we have a validated approach that if scaled will impact more lives. TERAWORK’s solution can scale to connect millions for work.

Sufficient fund or not, it is discovered that about 60% of small businesses in Nigeria shuts down before the age of 3 as a result of not having easy access to a scalable source of manpower, skills and expertise. Globally, spending too much time or money in hiring workforce at the onset is another reason SMEs die at their early years. Daily, businesses spend 200 million hours searching for competent professionals and over $443 million are lost annually due to failed projects as a result of skill shortage.

Yet, geographical barriers, uneven availability of job opportunities, COVID-19 pandemic which now threatens existing jobs amongst other things, contribute to challenges faced by jobseekers. There are disadvantaged jobseekers in remote areas where jobs and training opportunities are both difficult and expensive to access. Many women with children face an additional barrier to employment in that they have to limit their search to workplaces that have childcare facilities either on-site or in close proximity. This limits an already narrowed window of opportunity for them. 

It turns out, while skills shortages and unfilled roles are ravaging SMEs growth, millions of people in the same countries are struggling to get or keep their jobs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

TERAWORK creates a digital hub, an online freelance marketplace, void of geographical barriers, where demands for professionals with certain skill sets by businesses or individuals are met by adequate supply of independent workers, with varying levels of expertise, experience and engagement costs, who are willing to offer their services via freelancing. We offer faster hiring process, where employers can search and filter profiles of thousands of professionals and engage them for their tasks in few clicks. TERAWORK offers flexible work pattern that accommodates nursing mothers and inclusion for Africans youth with traditionally high unemployment numbers.

We do not just connect businesses and individuals with professionals, but further leverage on technology to handle the process that facilitates efficient service delivery end to end. With our robust search algorithm, real-time chat, secure online payments, project management tools for collaboration, post work review system which enable both parties to rate each other, training opportunities for freelancers, we ensure that employers only pay for services that are delivered based on agreed terms and conditions.

Freelancers showcase themselves by building profiles that display their skill sets, experience, achievements, work history, reviews, ratings etc. Employers leverage on data to make better decisions about whom to hire.

Over 37 millions small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs with lean budgets, requiring help of professionals in fields they have zero knowledge of but crucial to their businesses’ success, who often are not able to afford hiring top talent on permanent basis but would rather hire them when needs arise ‘on pay as you go basis’. 

Hundreds of thousands of businesses with varying manpower requirements, who can get things done quickly with short-term remote workers.

Tens of millions of individuals across Africa cities that need to outsource personal digital tasks they can’t handle on their own and can leverage on our pool of independent workers, with skills across wide range of services and different level of expertise, to achieve more with ease.

More than 5 million young individuals with marketable skills in Nigeria, and tens of millions across Africa who are willing to develop their skills and offer freelance services in various fields such as writing, communications, creative design, software and technology, audio and video productions, business, fashion, lifestyle, web development, social media, digital marketing etc. 

Reality of COVID-19 pandemic making work from home more popular, thus giving thousands of skilled nursing mother chances to earn income via offering freelance services.

The problem of small and new businesses not having timely and easy access to flexible and scalable source of manpower and expertise; challenges of uneven availability of job opportunities for Nigerian and African skilled/semi-skilled are being resolved by our end-to-end freelance solution that efficiently brings both parties together in a manner to create economic advantages without geographical barrier. This directly link to our selection in that our solution enables businesses access to network of professionals on on-demand basis to grow, and equally create jobs for the supposed jobless. 

In addition, freelancers can acquire new skills needed for their personal growth.

Most competitions around like VConnect, Asuqu, Findworka, Oledo, etc. just provide listing of workers, and have little or no process in place to support remote work. Some of them first charge their clients non-refundable fees only to provide them with list of ill-matched or unvetted workers, which often lead to disputes and bad experiences for all parties.  

Unlike them, TERAWORK is the only end-to-end freelance platform that has created a process that makes clients and professional freelancers trust working remotely with each other, with ease, through our various highly functional features we built, tested and integrated into our model. Our process correctly matches freelancers with prospective clients, which are 90% small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs. Also, we have process that ensures that freelancers only get paid for services they successfully delivered based on agreed terms and conditions between them and their clients. We have achieved job success rate of over 98% and have handled more job transactions than all our local competitions combine.

Compared with how new and small businesses conventionally hire, TERAWORK makes hiring process, which traditionally takes 10 to 60 days to complete, something that can be completed within 24 hours, eliminating or reducing geographical, informational and administrative barriers in the process.  

With our in-house engineering, enterprise design thinking and digital marketing teams, TERAWORK used various technologies to build a business model that empowers businesses to search for freelance professionals and make informed decisions about whom to hire. Clients are presented with adequate facts about relevant freelancers, such as their job success rate, number of jobs completed, experience, achievements, price, reviews and ratings written by past clients etc. 

Our technological process allows clients, if applicable, to also be service providers (freelancers) to others with the same single user account without hassle thereby increasing our social impacts. 

To achieve higher success rate and keep raising the bar of service delivery in Nigeria, we have built processes that ensure that our freelancers are vetted from time to time, get trained, adequately exposed and only get jobs that match their skill sets and experience level through our in-app search algorithm.

Our solution is based on a concept of a marketplace that provides a two-sided digital platform for people to sell or buy variety of freelance services including writing and communication, virtual assistance, art and creative design, technology and programming, web, social and digital marketing, fashion and lifestyle, events, photography etc. 

Platforms like freelance.com, Upwork, Fiverr, People per hour etc have utilize similar technology in their respective countries in Europe and America to build similar solutions. 

Also, the below-listed publications amongst many are evidences that our solution is indeed needed to help improve economies of various African countries, which is TERAWORK primary focus.

 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/06/02/jobs-without-borders

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/publications/platform-sourcing.pdf

https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/evaluation-impact-rockefeller-foundations-digital-jobs-africa-initiative/

Thirdly, the various social media posts below are various testimonials from our users

 https://www.instagram.com/p/B8PD8aGHeWl/?igshid=7eerh9i9np5o

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3btwuvnTrq/?igshid=1r5en5ysu5xu8

https://twitter.com/teraworkng/status/1230869241613737986?s=21

TERAWORK provides a highly functional and robust online freelance marketplace that is rich in relevant features and efficient processes to enable clients (individuals, small and new businesses) quickly and flexibly search, hire, work with and pay vetted professional freelancers in a very convenient manner. TERAWORK provides processes that enable freelancers deliver tasks given to them on time and at agreed quality, terms and conditions between them and their clients. To kickstart activities on the digital platform, TERAWORK carefully recruited handful of vetted competent freelancers handpicked through varieties of offline activities across several service categories in readiness to start offering freelance services. Lastly, TERAWORK creates awareness of its newly built freelance marketplace among relevant stakeholders including SMEs as well as aspiring entrepreneurs and individuals we perceived will need our solution. 

Our immediate goals are to enable businesses engage our freelancers on continuous basis to fulfill their manpower needs, ensure their businesses do not lack supply of needed professionals to grow their businesses. Also, we want to see that skilled or semi-skilled unemployed youths and work from home nursing women onboarded as freelancers on our platform get engaged continuously with short-term tasks given to them by businesses using our solution and earn income from time to time. Lastly, part of our immediate goals is to see new users voluntarily coming onboard to use our solution.

These immediate goals link to our long-term outcomes which is to see more businesses becoming successful as a result of having access to flexible, scalable highly skilled manpower to grow their businesses and create economic opportunities in the societies. Also, we want to see joblessness as a result of geographical barriers, uneven availability of employment opportunities or lack of required new skills disappear across Africa. 

To test some of these links, we carried out small-scale tests where few businesses continuously utilize our platform to fulfill their manpower needs. Results show that most of those businesses overcame their workforce shortage challenge, stand better chances of having their businesses succeed and become established. Also, few of our freelancers earn income doing tasks that give then new learning experiences.

Since launch, TERAWORK has more than 6,000 active users and over 4,000 freelance jobs (and still counting) have exchange hands between our freelancers and our buyers comprising small businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals. More that 60% of the orders are from same buyers making repeated purchases from same or another freelancer, which validate satisfaction on the quality of delivery by our freelancers and processes we have put in place. Our freelancers have achieved job success rate of about 99.2%.

With various ongoing automations, further engineering enhancements, marketing and expansion plans, TERAWORK intends to increase the number of transactions by at least 1,000%, (i.e. 60,000 active users) in the next one year and achieve 50% annual growth in subsequent years.

In the next one year our goals will be the following;

• Complete enhancement of our platform to improve users experience through implementing new relevant and useful features, increase intuitiveness, robustness, security and user friendliness of our app
• Launch TERAWORK Mobile Apps which will significantly improve usability and enable our users easily access their accounts to buy or sell freelance services on the go.
• Onboard more SMEs and affiliate established businesses and brands as clients in order to drastically increase volumes of transactions and activities thereby finding more opportunities for our freelancers
• Onboard more freelancers and improve on our partnership with major technology companies to provide more relevant trainings for new skills acquisition for our freelancers.
• Increase marketing campaigns and activities with Nigeria, and commence marketing awareness in other African Countries

In the next five years TERAWORK aims to become the defacto freelance platform in Africa and home to millions of SMEs and well-established businesses majorly in Africa connecting them to tens of millions of freelance professionals in Africa and beyond for work. Doing so will facilitate steady supply of competent manpower resources to businesses and ensure higher chances of success for new businesses while increasing productivity for established ones within African region and beyond. In addition, we aim to launch in countries in Middle East, Asia, Europe and America, and have local reps to facilitate growth and penetrations in major cities around the world.  

One major challenges TERAWORK faces is having businesses adopt using our freelance professionals, as there exist competitions who have flooded their platforms with unvetted freelancers and businesses that utilized them had encountered unpleasant experiences. However, with continuous enhancement of our platform, continuous refinement of our processes, continuous vetting of freelancers and increased marketing awareness more businesses are beginning to adopt TERAWORK for their outsourcing and manpower needs. 

TERAWORK has tested on a small scales four key strategies to overcome our barriers, and will, in the coming years, intensify efforts and commit more resources in following areas;

• Continuous Enhancement of our Platform: Continuous deployment of new relevant technologies that makes our platform solution work better.
• Continuous Refinement of our Processes: Continue to refine and align our processes to become better fit for businesses and enterprise use. 
• Continuous vetting and Training of our Freelance Professionals: Continue to find better ways to continuously vet of our freelancers, and make available, through partnerships we will seek from various relevant institutions and academia, varieties of training courses that help them upskill and become better fit to handle tasks given to them by our clients 
• Increased Marketing Awareness: We intend to drastically increase our marketing campaigns and awareness, both through digital, social media and traditional (offline) channels.  

Not applicable

Full time staff: 12

With a master’s degree from Northumbria University Newcastle, UK and having had close to 10 years’ experience in the UK and Nigeria banking industry that span across disciplines including cloud computing, software engineering, security, IP network etc Femi Taiwo founded TERAWORK. He was joined by wife, COO Titi Taiwo, a seasoned Human Resources expert with 8 years’ experience that spans across wellness, oil and gas and software industries. Also, his friend and colleague, Technology Director Abimbola Sarumi, alumni of Cyprus College, Nicosia Cyprus, an expert software engineer with 14 years’ cognitive experience in software development, enterprise storage and virtualization joined from inception. 

We encourage and nurture among the rest of our team members culture of continuous learning, application of knowledge gain to iterate and make all our processes and application better. Everybody is challenged to be highly curious, question status quo, set personal and team objectives, set key results, act and measure only what matters.

TERAWORK currently has the following;

IBM West Africa: partners with TERAWORK to provide free online and classroom base training courses for our freelancers in acquiring skills in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), Blockchain technologies, Internet of Things, e-commerce etc.

http://ibm.biz/terawork-dna

Google Business Group Lekki: a non-profit community of business professionals to share knowledge about web technologies for business success, and with over 150 local communities in various cities across the world. TERAWORK has strategic partnership with GBG Lekki where we co-sponsor events and speak at their various events. Recent community training events jointly organized by GBG Lekki and TERAWORK include, Business of Content and Standing Tall (Int'l Women's Day events amongst others.

TERAWORK’s business model is a two-sided freelance marketplace. We generate value by enabling buyers (businesses & individuals) interact with our freelancers, in the most convenient way, with the aim of hiring them for their one-off or short-term tasks. TERAWORK ensures that clients’ jobs are delivered on time and to their specifications, get value for their time and money; and freelancers promptly get paid for services they delivered on agreed quality, terms and conditions. 

TERAWORK earns income on the following;

• Charges transactional fee between 7 and 13% of each successful transaction and
• Clients’ premium services

The market for TERAWORK’s business is heavily dependent on scale; having millions of active users, thousands of new orders for freelance services on daily basis, and not less than 98% success rate on service delivery.

TERAWORK is using combination of income earned from our services – commission and clients’ premium services earnings, grants, donations and capital investment to fund its business. 

With support from Solve, we would increase our marketing awareness. We intend to drastically increase our marketing campaigns and awareness, both through digital, social media and offline channels to enable more people discover us, use and benefit from our solution.

Continuous enhancement of our processes, platform, mobile apps, and continuous provision of free training courses for our freelancers are key to enable us better serve our new and existing users (businesses) and increase their number drastically. Solve financial support will go a long way helping us in this regard.

Beyond financial support, becoming a Solve finalist would give us access to some of the most intelligent minds within Solve community and beyond. In addition, Solve would provide priceless validation of our vision of connecting businesses with freelancers for work, would further attract and convert more established businesses.

We require supports in areas selected above to help us rapidly expand our brand awareness, reach out to acquire more users within the shortest possible time, who will benefit from our solution. 

Access to the entire Solve, MIT communities of intelligent minds for business mentoring, supports and resources that could help us add more values to our users, including free online trainings courses across variety of services we offer on our platform 

Oxford University: For freelancers training support

Google: For freelancers training support

Microsoft: For freelancers training support

TERAWORK is driving positive social change for young women with the opportunity to flexibly work from home or remotely. On our online freelance platform female professionals can earn flexible income while caring for children and elderly family members if need be. TERAWORK is the platform for women who are seeking to express and acquire new skillsets, make money and conserve their time. Basically, working in the comfort of their homes and on their own terms.

 TERAWORK flexibility, inclusiveness and innovation, represents an opportunity to reach women and youth seeking employment.

Already, TERAWORK in conjunction with Google Business Group, Lekki is sponsoring events targeted at women development in business. One of such recently is Women Will (Lekki) – A grow with Google Initiative, giving women equal access to information and opportunity.

Our impact has been felt in our local community. A commercial bank in Nigeria, Sterling Bank Plc’s ‘One Woman’ Award, celebrated our COO, a woman of course, alongside 5 other women nationwide in the International Women’s Day Celebration in February 2020, themed ‘Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value’. TERAWAORK was celebrated as company that strives to give equal opportunities to women. 

Sterling Bank Plc Instagram Post About TERAWORK

TERAWORK would use the prize for the following:

• To sponsor events and courses that promote women growth in skill and business.
• Develop and launch mobile apps so that access to the platform will be on the go
• Increase digital and offline marketing awareness targeting women within the identified age bracket

TERAWORK is an end-to-end freelance marketplace where businesses search, hire, work with, and pay vetted professionals for short-term tasks. Beyond being a technological platform that provides individuals opportunity to access and perform work from anywhere in the world, we also empower them to become a successful digital entrepreneur through significant skills development and social network building. Our partnership with IBM to provide free online base training courses for individuals in acquiring skills of the future in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), Blockchain technologies, Internet of Things, e-commerce etc. has been a huge success. This initiative has equipped thousands of youth – specifically those with limited access to opportunities – with the technical and soft skills, and job placement support necessary to transition into a technology-enabled workforce. 

http://ibm.biz/terawork

Also, TERAWORK model of personalized E-commerce web pages on our platform that archives and showcase history of jobs done, review from other clients further validate years of experience and qualify jobseekers/freelancers to seal more deals through references to reviews written by their past clients.

Presently we have MOU with IBM –Nigeria to also facilitate offline training using their Lagos Nigeria office for free with Internet and computer for 50 participants.

TERAWORK will use the prize to to advance this course by;

• Facilitating more online and offline trainings with larger capacity with free computers to all attendees  
• Develop and launch mobile apps so that the training can be access on the go
• Increase our digital and offline marketing awareness